The Incident, Staten Island Style

In Staten Island, where temperatures reached 104 degrees yesterday, a group of toughs took out their frustrations on the local populace:

Tempers boiled over yesterday along with the mercury — it hit 104 degrees in the borough on the third day of summer’s first heat wave — as a rowdy crowd pushed a peace officer into a public pool in Mariners Harbor and then attacked a baseball player on a field nearby.

The trouble started at about 5:30 p.m., as about 50 young people descended on the Grandview Playground mini-pool, located at Grandview Avenue and Continental Place, not far from the Mariners Harbor Houses. The youths were in street clothes and were too old for the mini-pool, said Warner Johnston, a Parks Department spokesman.

A Parks Enforcement Patrol officer confronted the rambunctious bunch, only to find herself being pushed into the pool, police said.

Apart from getting wet, the officer was uninjured, Johnston noted.

About 15 minutes later, the same group disrupted a men’s sandlot baseball game between the Tigers and Danny Boy’s Tavern that was getting under way on a field nearby.

The right fielder was doused with a pot full of water thrown by a teen-ager, who then hit the player with the empty pot, according to witnesses. The player was banged up but didn’t go to a hospital, they said.

The game was promptly canceled.

A massive water fight then ensued at the intersection of Continental Place and Brabant Avenue, with folks filling buckets, pots, pans and their hands from an illegally opened fire hydrant.

Cops quickly swarmed the area to disperse the group and firefighters were called in to shut off the hydrant.

Phew . . . Now That’s Hot!

It was so hot that we couldn’t help but read about it the following day:

On a day when the mercury climbed to 95 at Central Park and 99 at LaGuardia Airport, city dwellers dealt with blackouts in some spots, stalled subways and canceled flights.

“Where I live I can’t go to the pool because it’s so packed,” said lower East Sider Jennifer Osorio, 30, who trekked all the way to Harlem to take a dip.

There were so many swimmers at the pool at Tompkins Square Park on Avenue A that lifeguards were rotating them in and out of the water every 20 minutes.

And at Coney Island yesterday, bathers griped about all the trash strewn on the beach after a weekend that saw 1.7 million people flock to Brooklyn’s sandy cool spot.

“I picked up two hypodermic needles,” said Carol O’Donnell of Brooklyn, who took her 8-year-old granddaughter, Kara, to the famed beach.

City officials said the mess was due to five of the 23 giant beachcomber machines breaking down.

Residents and business owners staying inside under air conditioners consumed 12,869 megawatts of power, the second-highest figure in city history.

The power drain sparked a blackout at LaGuardia Airport, prompting Delta and American Airlines to cancel flights between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

The 1, 2, 3, V and W trains were either stalled or diverted because of lost signal power between 9:16 a.m. and 10:59 a.m.

The city Emergency Medical Service saw heat-related calls spike from a normal of two a day to 42 yesterday.

In Astoria, Queens, 470 Con Edison customers were left in the dark, and 3,500 more were without juice in Westchester.

As manhole covers exploded and power lines caught fire, Michael Hardy of Astoria sat in his car with the air conditioning on. “I can’t get air conditioning inside my apartment,” he explained.

It’s So Hot That . . .

It’s so hot that the third rail on the A train buckled. No, seriously:

Temperatures reached 95 degrees in Central Park yesterday afternoon. That may not be a record for New York City — temperatures soared to 106 degrees in Central Park on July 9, 1936 — but the National Weather Service still deemed yesterday worthy of a heat advisory for the region, warning that heat and humidity would make temperatures feel above 100 degrees.

Today may feel worse: forecasters said that temperatures could reach 100 degrees near La Guardia Airport and in Newark, and Central Park may sauté in the upper 90’s.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said to help residents cope, especially those who did not have air-conditioning, the city set up more than 300 cooling stations — schools or city offices with ample air-conditioning and cold water.

The hours for 51 public swimming pools were extended, he said, remaining open an extra hour until 8 p.m., and spray showers in parks and playgrounds remained open until sunset.

. . .

A Manhattan-bound A train came to a halt at 12:45 p.m., shortly after it left the Beach 67th Street station in the Rockaways, when its electrified third rail buckled from the heat. About 70 passengers remained on the train until about 2:30 p.m., when they were led several hundred feet along the tracks to an intersection where they made their way to the street, said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit.

The Post report makes it sound absolutely totally utterly horrible:

While no injuries were reported, passengers were furious with MTA, saying the workers could have gotten them off a lot faster instead of allowing them to roast in cars until 3 p.m. with no air conditioning.

Transit officials said the passengers were on the train for so long because the MTA first planned to send a rescue train to pick them up. But that plan was scrapped, and they walked everybody off.

“They brought all the people into three cars and then opened the doors so they would have fresh air and to make sure they were safe,” a transit spokesman explained.

In other words, the only thing worse than being stuck on an unairconditioned train is being crammed into only three cars of a stuck unairconditioned train.

Shit’s Fucked Up, Dude

The Daily News joins in the fear mongering, showing us how in the event of a strong hurricane, the entire Rockaway peninsula could be toast:

Disaster is brewing in the Rockaways.

More than 100,000 people live on an 11-mile spit of sand with just three routes to the mainland. A moderate hurricane would cover the peninsula with water — and a heavy one would obliterate everything.

But even as the city’s emergency planners are practicing how to evacuate the Rockaways to save lives, city housing officials are eagerly pushing plans to build almost 4,000 new homes there — right in the path of coastal storms.

“It’s insane,” said Queens College Prof. Nicholas Coch, a nationally recognized hurricane expert. “People who live in Rockaways are really playing roulette with Mother Nature.”

Hundreds of upscale homes, priced higher than $500,000, already have been built at Arverne by the Sea, an $800 million development on land that had lain fallow for decades.

Demand is strong and the city Housing Preservation and Development Department envisions thousands more homes rising nearby — thanks to the allure of New York’s last undeveloped beachfront property.

“People are only as smart as their collective memories,” said John Lepore, head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “There’s not been major, major storms for a while, and people have become affluent, and everybody wants to live near the water.”

New Yorkers generally don’t think of their city as vulnerable to the kind of deadly storms that hit New Orleans, Miami or Houston. But experts say the city has been thrashed before — and is coming due for another devastating storm.

“Why do we forget our own history?” Coch asked. “We have a major development in an area where history has shown that hurricanes have done tremendous damage.”

An 1893 hurricane destroyed homes and hotels along the south-facing coast of the Rockaways, and subsequent storms reshaped sandbars and inlets of the area. A 1938 hurricane that ravaged Long Island swamped stretches of the Rockaways.

Hurricane Ekaterina? Or, Katrina The Great Freaks Out Brighton Beach

The Russian-language press is stirring up fears of a catastrophic hurricane hitting Brighton Beach:

Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach are living in fear of a hurricane threat to which the rest of New York City seems largely oblivious. Speculation that a severe storm could soon descend on Brooklyn has been rife among immigrant senior citizens, many of whom are reportedly stocking up on water and medicine in preparation for an emergency that is much less likely to happen than some of the local Russian press and broadcast outlets have reported.

. . .

“I know one businessman who closed his business,” the editor in chief of a local paper, Russkii Bazaar, Natalia Shapiro, said. “He went back to live in Russia until the hurricane season is over.”

Employees at Pharmacy Express on Brighton Beach Avenue said that in May, senior citizens started coming in saying they were worried about a hurricane. “People read the Russian-language newspapers, and they believe every word,” a pharmacist, Tatiana Shmaian, said. Ms. Shmaian said her daughter lives in Moscow and called her to make sure she was okay after hearing about a potential hurricane on Russian television.

“They’re hearing there’s going to be a hurricane in 24 hours,” Pat Singer of the Brighton Neighborhood Association said. Ms. Singer said senior citizens have come into her office and asked what they should do if the city declares a weather-related evacuation. “They’re old, they can’t run, and they’re scared,” she said. “Katrina scared a lot of people.”

Ms. Singer, who cannot read Russian, blamed the local Russian newspapers for the speculation, saying editors are trying to scare their readers in order to boost sales. “It’s a ghetto, a Russian ghetto neighborhood. They read their own newsletters, watch their own television stations,” she said.

The scare appears to have started in March, when several Russian-language newspapers in America published a re port that said: “In the coming summer, a powerful hurricane could descend on New York with a force no less forgiving than Katrina, which emptied New Orleans last year.” That warning also was picked up by news sources in Russia. Then, at the end of last month, the New York Russian paper V Novom Svete ran a cover story citing a French scientist who said a tsunami would rip through Manhattan on May 25.

Then again, the prospect of a hurricane hitting New York does seem pretty frightening . . .